Is your workplace a machine?

Many of the first "management" theorists were engineers, so it's hardly surprising that they imagined organizations as machines. We've lived with the metaphor for over a century now. It's worked quite well, actually. Engineers applied the concept of planning to human activities and, very often generated a major improvement in productivity. That was still true
during the Second World War when Robert McNamara and the other "Whiz Kids" applied quantitative methods to inventory control and logistics in the Army. McNamara used the same analytical techniques at Ford and the Defense Department. The machine has had a good, long run but now it's time for something different. Machines simply aren't a good model for organizations and a fast-moving knowledge economy. The big problem is that competitive advantage in this century will be driven by people. Their knowledge and relationships can be powerful generators of success, but only if the people are allowed to act on their own. The parts of a machine don't do that. We need a model that uses less planning and control while it allows more individual decision. Nature is full of things like that. We call them "
complex adaptive systems." The new model won't work if we hang on to old ideas about planning, prediction, and control. Managers will have to let go some. Team members will have to make more decisions. Human resource and compensation systems will need to change too.

"Thanks for the comment. I'm sure that what we call ""self-managing teams"" will be part of whatever our work place looks like half a century from now. It has human roots in the hunting parties or food preparation groups that have existed since the dawn of time. From my perspective, the fact that we have a special name for it now means that it's generally a special case and I think that will change. "

"This strikes me as more of a ""bottom-up"" approach where those on the bottom of the org chart are the ones doing the work and can tell those above what is happening and be given some autonomy to get the work done as managers may not have the same expertise as those that were hired for specific roles.

Are you familiar with the idea of a ""self-managing team?"" This is something I've seen in software development circles that can work quite well as there isn't someone in charge but rather collectively everyone is smarter than any individual person. In this scenario, while each person may be seen as somewhat interchangeable initially, each person's strengths may show at some point and this can lead to someone possibly do more of a kind of work than others in the team. For example, some people may really enjoy collecting requirements and covering some basic scenarios while someone else may prefer to be more of a tester that likes to see the final product rather than when things are rather abstract and a lot of ""What if...""s are still to be answered.

I do fear that some may think the workplace is now just a computer, where as long as there is Instant Messaging, e-mail and a browser to handle web-based applications which could include customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning or content management systems to name a few of the bigger ones, this is what one needs to do their job rather than a physical office. "